SITE REVIEW: Book forum

a friend and i decided to create a decent forum for the book series 'redwall' it is a childrens book series. im not asking you to register, or post (wanted, though)

i need some crits on how it looks

http://redwall.hopto.org/forum

thanks

You could do with either some background on the books or a link to another 'site that has some details. That way you may be able to gain some interest from people that may not have read the books.

The cream border could also do with livening up, at the moment it's just a lot of blank space. Other than that it's pretty good, nice use of the artwork.

get rid of the borders of the left navigation and share the same background with its surroundings.

it will prolly look better.

i will try that and see how it goes


ooh...good idea. i think i should do that for sure... i was thinking about that earlier, but thought it was not a real big deal



i completely agree, and i decided to build a webpage to go along with the forum, because so many ppl have suggested that (at other forums)

thanks for the comments

I think the site looks very good and appropriate.
The top banner looks really nice cause of the splash of color it adds.
Only suggestion I can think of is maybe some more color somewhere else too. Its a great looking site, but I think another shot of color at the bottom or somewhere might help

I absolutely love the header. Ok, I think that the site is unbalanced. the forum is on the right, then you have a small menu on the left, it just does not look very balanced. Now the mouse on the bottom corner adds balance at the bottom of the page. You just need something to fill that gap, perhaps some vines or something like that.

Also it would be better if the menu was on the same horizontal line as the top of the forum, It looks awkward sort of.

The font on the menu "appears" to be bigger than the topic headings. Perhaps that is an optical thing, not sure what you could do to match them better. But the menu text also appears to be spaced out more.

These are just my opinions, I think this forum has a potential to be designed even better than it already has. Keep up the good work!

first of all, thank you so much for all the comments and suggestions. it really means a lot. we are going to create a website to go with the forum, to provide a db for the books, and hopefully increase traffic.

we will be adding links for the website under the in-forum links. the in-forum links will be made smaller.

as far as filling up the margin beneath the nav bar, i agree that it looks uneven. possibly in the future i will add tiny little banners as links to other websites...but i dont know. i also think there should be more color added to the site...i will work on ideas for that.
i think adding vines would be perfect, too. do you think that a vine down the right side of the navbar would look good?

thanks a million for the comments

nate

I think that vine idea is very cool, I wonder how it will turn out looking
(looks great in my head)

I really like the texturing and shadowing on the borders, it adds some depth to the page

I really like the colors and the header looks great. I also agree that it looks off balance. If you placed the menu across the page under Realm of Redwall then center the forum on the page, I think it would balance things out.

-Cindy

ok, we are now working on the rest of the website...i will make an announcement when we are done (1-4 weeks maybe)

cool, look forward to seeing it

Hi,
The site is indeed good. I liked the color combination. But I feel you could use more images on the index page. Just my 2 cents.